Masters Profile: Priscilla Welch

Bird set free

Like many people, Priscilla Welch didn't take up running until later in life. The difference is, she just kept getting better, representing Great Britain in the first Olympic women's marathon, and going on to win New York and London as a master, setting a masters world record that still stands 21 years later.

"I think it's about time that was broken," she said in characteristically dry humor, a few days after her induction into the Distance Running Hall of Fame. ("And I didn't even have to die to get in," she quipped.)

In the early '80s, when women's distance running was exploding on the world scene, Welch was the poster girl for housewives trading their aprons for adidas and getting out of the kitchen and onto the roads. They couldn't help but identify with a self-proclaimed partier and couch potato who, after meeting her husband, Dave, at age 35, took up running only to stave off boredom while both were stationed in Norway with the British military. She ran her first marathon in Stockholm in 1979, finishing in 3:29: Good, but certainly no indication of what was to come. A transfer to the windswept Shetland Islands made her training more challenging, but she persevered. "I got two years of base training in Norway, then two more of aerobic conditioning in the Shetlands," she recalls.

Welch dipped under the 3-hour barrier at the 1980 London Marathon, an experience she terms "magical," but the real breakthrough came after moving back to England in 1983. Four marathons later, she ran 2:28:54 at the L.A. Olympics, finishing sixth in 2:28:54, just two months shy of her 40th birthday. Welch's chronological age was belied by her youthful enthusiasm, something she still displays. "I was 39 going on 16," she says.

After turning 40, Welch set masters world records at numerous road distances. "But those races were just a means to an end," she recalls. "The goal was always the marathon."

The high point of that pursuit came in 1987, when she won New York in 2:30:17 at nearly 43 years of age. The following spring she set the masters record at Boston in 2:30:48, a mark that stood until 2002. She continued racing at a high level until 1992, when a diagnosis of breast cancer and the ensuing treatment forced her to the sidelines.

Welch's only coach for her entire career was her husband, who unexpectedly passed away during a bike tour of Switzerland in late 2006. "We were a great team," she recalls. "Dave knew a lot about training, and he was quick to realize what worked for me and what didn't, and quickly prune down the schedule." Most of that training was effort-based, using the principles Dave had gleaned from Training Distance Runners by Peter Coe and Dr. Dave Martin.

"You need to teach the body to burn fat and carbohydrate at the same time," says Welch, and to that end, she ran lots of "long slow miles." She was also an early advocate of altitude training; prior to the '84 Olympics, she and Dave set up a training base in Boulder, and lived there for 17 years afterward.

Asked to pick one key workout most responsible for her success, Welch singled out a session of long repeats, usually kilometers but sometimes 800s or 600s if she was particularly tired. "I'd do 3 sets of 5, at 85 percent of max heart rate, with just a 200 recovery after each rep," she recalls. "That was a pretty good indicator of what my current marathon pace would be."

Although Welch once joked that her husband was "a slave driver, and I was a willing participant," more truthful was her assessment that running made her feel "like a bird let out of a cage -- I loved it that much."